AMD to launch Atom competitor by the end of the year

Earlier this week we first heard rumors about AMD developing a chip aimed at the rising netbook market that would effectively compete with Intelís Atom and VIAís Nano CPUs. Not many details were available at the time, other than a presentation slide supposedly authored by AMD showing a sub-10 watt processor running at 1GHz.

Apparently, we should be seeing AMDís new chip by the end of the year Ė if a recent report from DigiTimes is to be believed. The low-cost processor will be based on the companyís previous-generation K8 architecture and is said to support 64-bit instructions. It will be a single-core model built on the companyís 65nm fabrication process and will reportedly run at a clock speed of 1.2GHz.

DigiTimesí sources also expect the new chip to be priced slightly lower than Intelís Atom and claim the company is already in conversations with MSI, HP, Acer, and other vendors in China to plan out future orders.